Strange SATA drive problem

[monoman]

Hi,


I had a SATA hard disk crash recently. The drive is still recognised by the BIOS but when i come to reinstall windows on it, it just sticks at the point where it says something like “examining hard disk”.
I should add that i've pressed F6 and installed the SATA drivers before installation.


The weird thing is, if i boot up from my other (IDE) hard drive with the SATA plugged in, it takes ages to boot. After saying windows is starting, it takes about 5 minutes before the log in screen. Once there, i can't access the start menu but i can run programs after pressing ctrl alt del.


I say this is weird because i can't see what my SATA drive has to do with anything when i'm booting from my other drive! Any ideas?


Anyway, once in windows, i run msinfo (i think) and see that the SATA drive is recognised. However if i run compmgmt.msc to run the disk management so that i can activate the SATA, it says it's looking for the drives but never returns anything.


Another idea is to boot from Dos to see if i can see the drive. Is it just a case of adding my sata driver to a config file on the boot disk or do i need specific Dos SATA drivers? (I've searched the net and can't find any)


Hope someone can help


Cheers

[kevin]

The weird thing is, if i boot up from my other (IDE) hard drive with the SATA plugged in, it takes ages to boot. After saying windows is starting, it takes about 5 minutes before the log in screen. Once there, i can't access the start menu but i can run programs after pressing ctrl alt del.

what happens if you boot your ide drive without the sata plugged in?

When you pressed F6 to load your own drivers did you use drivers that came with the drive, or ones downloaded from the manufacturers web site? I've usually found downloading (if you have another computer available at least) has better results.

everytime i've had a problem with sata drives it's been because of a crap cable. but i've only used sata with Linux, not Windows. and I haven't had to boot from them yet.

[moopet]

I don't have any idea what could cause that, but I'd suggest the obvious: getting hold of another SATA drive, if you can, to help diagnose the problem. If it works ok with the new (borrowed?) drive then it's your old drive, else it's your PC hardware or Windows. It's a start, anyway :)

[a_unique_person]

Sounds like you might have done exactly what my brother in law recently did. Pulled out an old IDE that was in tandem with the existing IDE, and added the SATA. The system displayed symptoms similar to what you are reporting.

The fix was to go to the IDE drive that was still in there, and make sure the jumpers on the back were set to say it was a solitary drive with no other IDE drives present.

[monoman]

what happens if you boot your ide drive without the sata plugged in?

When you pressed F6 to load your own drivers did you use drivers that came with the drive, or ones downloaded from the manufacturers web site? I've usually found downloading (if you have another computer available at least) has better results.

everytime i've had a problem with sata drives it's been because of a crap cable. but i've only used sata with Linux, not Windows. and I haven't had to boot from them yet.

Thanks for all your replys

The other drive boots up fine without the sata plugged in.

With the sata drive plugged in, i used the drivers that came with the computer - i'll try downloading some new ones

Luckily, i have another cable, so i was able to test with both - same results (as in bad)

[monoman]

I don't have any idea what could cause that, but I'd suggest the obvious: getting hold of another SATA drive, if you can, to help diagnose the problem. If it works ok with the new (borrowed?) drive then it's your old drive, else it's your PC hardware or Windows. It's a start, anyway :)

I can't get hold of another drive but i will try taking my sata drive to a computer shop and see if it works there

[monoman]

Sounds like you might have done exactly what my brother in law recently did. Pulled out an old IDE that was in tandem with the existing IDE, and added the SATA. The system displayed symptoms similar to what you are reporting.

The fix was to go to the IDE drive that was still in there, and make sure the jumpers on the back were set to say it was a solitary drive with no other IDE drives present.

I wish this is what i'd done but the pc had been running fine for a year with an IDE as master and the sata as master.
I will check the ide drive though to see that it is jumpered properly.

Were the symptons exactly the same - taking ages to boot up from the ide drive when the sata drive was plugged in?

[a_unique_person]

Yes, boot up was very long. Make sure it is not jumpered as 'master'. It has to be jumpered as 'stand alone'. Windows could not be loaded on to the SATA. That was what made me think of it.

[a_unique_person]

Have you changed brands. I think it is one particular brand of drive that does this. When you tell it that it is the 'master' drive, it appears that it insists on trying to connect to the slave drive, and won't give up until it does.

Make sure the drive is jumpered as single, no slave. Or use cable select.

[Iconoclast]

Have you changed brands. I think it is one particular brand of drive that does this. When you tell it that it is the 'master' drive, it appears that it insists on trying to connect to the slave drive, and won't give up until it does.

Make sure the drive is jumpered as single, no slave. Or use cable select.Eh? Ever IDE drive I've ever played with only had jumper settings for "Master", "Slave", and "Cable Select". What's this "single, no slave" setting you speak of? Is that what you get if you leave the jumper off completely?

[a_unique_person]

Yes. That was what fixed for the brother in law. Once it believed there was no slave, (which there wasn't), everything worked perfectly. Once again, I think it is that brand only which does it. I have had other weird things like this happen before. Eg, several years ago, a PC which had a CD ROM added to it, with the CD-ROM on a seperate cable, but jumpered as slave. The CD-ROM was only recognised if you powered up, then reset the PC. When I fixed the jumper settings, it was fine.

[monoman]

Have you changed brands. I think it is one particular brand of drive that does this. When you tell it that it is the 'master' drive, it appears that it insists on trying to connect to the slave drive, and won't give up until it does.

Make sure the drive is jumpered as single, no slave. Or use cable select.

No, both drives are exactly the same. The ide is ibm deskstar and the sata is hitachi.

I went to the hitachi website to download the latest sata drivers and it said it doesn't provide them because they come with windows xp! As far as i'm aware this is only true with sp2 which i don't have installed.

I did download an hitachi check/ fix drive dos utility. It recognised the sata drive but hung the computer when doing the 3rd of it's tests - probabely when it came to actually reading data off the drive. This pis*es me off, surely it should test and if the drive is dead come back and say so!

I will try taking the jumpers of the ibm drive to see if the computer will boot up normally with the sata drive pluged in.

Thanks so far

[kevin]

No, both drives are exactly the same. The ide is ibm deskstar and the sata is hitachi.

I went to the hitachi website to download the latest sata drivers and it said it doesn't provide them because they come with windows xp! As far as i'm aware this is only true with sp2 which i don't have installed.

I did download an hitachi check/ fix drive dos utility. It recognised the sata drive but hung the computer when doing the 3rd of it's tests - probabely when it came to actually reading data off the drive. This pis*es me off, surely it should test and if the drive is dead come back and say so!

I will try taking the jumpers of the ibm drive to see if the computer will boot up normally with the sata drive pluged in.

Thanks so far

hmmm, if the drive is under warranty most companies will treat a failure under the their check drive utility as a warranty issue and replace the drive.

[thrombus29]

The warranty's now are mostly only for one year now, I bought 4 120 Gig SATA maxtors about a year and a half ago, and three of the four all crapped out on me one at a time the same way (Light clicking leading to clunking/freezing) over a period of 3 months.

My year is up, I am SOL.

I am going to go buy a 200 Gig Seagate tomorrow, and pay an extra few dollars for the 3 year warranty if they have it.

[monoman]

Yes. That was what fixed for the brother in law. Once it believed there was no slave, (which there wasn't), everything worked perfectly. Once again, I think it is that brand only which does it. I have had other weird things like this happen before. Eg, several years ago, a PC which had a CD ROM added to it, with the CD-ROM on a seperate cable, but jumpered as slave. The CD-ROM was only recognised if you powered up, then reset the PC. When I fixed the jumper settings, it was fine.

I tried removing the jumpers on the IDE drive but it didn't work. BIOS actually thought the IDE was now a slave but it still booted up in the same fashion - very slowly.
I just can't understand how the sata drive (which it isn't booting from) can effect it.
I can't remember if i mentioned before but when i do boot up from the IDE drive with the bad sata drive plugged in, the start menu doesn't work. I have to do every thing from running programs from the windows task manager

On a side note, if there is a power surge, can it effect the pc or will the transformer in the pc blow first and protect the internal workings?

[EagleEye]

In my experience, overheating has been the major problem with early SATA drives, which would include this one if it's over 1.5 years old.

[a_unique_person]

I tried removing the jumpers on the IDE drive but it didn't work. BIOS actually thought the IDE was now a slave but it still booted up in the same fashion - very slowly.
I just can't understand how the sata drive (which it isn't booting from) can effect it.
I can't remember if i mentioned before but when i do boot up from the IDE drive with the bad sata drive plugged in, the start menu doesn't work. I have to do every thing from running programs from the windows task manager

On a side note, if there is a power surge, can it effect the pc or will the transformer in the pc blow first and protect the internal workings?

Could it be a bug in the BIOS? Have you tried updating that?

Switch mode power supplies don't have a transformer, as such. The good ones, (such as the one I nearly blew up yesterday), will automatically shut down when they detect a power surge. But I doubt if that is the problem.

Then again, you never know. The only way to prove it definitively is to swap things in and out, one by one, till you have the culprit. For example, try the SATA drive in another PC with the same (preferably) configuration. These things can take a long time to resolve..

[monoman]

Could it be a bug in the BIOS? Have you tried updating that?

Switch mode power supplies don't have a transformer, as such. The good ones, (such as the one I nearly blew up yesterday), will automatically shut down when they detect a power surge. But I doubt if that is the problem.

Then again, you never know. The only way to prove it definitively is to swap things in and out, one by one, till you have the culprit. For example, try the SATA drive in another PC with the same (preferably) configuration. These things can take a long time to resolve..

I've just updated the BIOS to no avail. I'm going to take the drive into town now to test on another pc. Fingers crossed.....

[a_unique_person]

Yep, you are screwed. Happens to the best of us.

[monoman]

Yep, you are screwed. Happens to the best of us.
Actually i'm not! I took the drive to a pc shop and it worked fine.
It still doesn't work in mine so it must be something to do with something else - obviously.
After seeing Roger's thread about his SATA drive, i installed KNOPPIX and could seamlessly browse the STATA drive. (I couldn't however copy any files over - but i address that problem in roger's thread).

So, what's going on here?

(1) I can't boot from my good IDE drive when the SATA drive is plugged in
(2) I can't boot from the SATA drive
(3) Dos based hdd fixing programs hang when trying to look at the SATA drive
(4) It works perfectly in KNOPPIX!

[a_unique_person]

As I said at the start, it just reminds me exactly of the problems my brother in law was having with his PC when he replaced an IDE drive with a SATA. You have done what I did to fix the problem, but it still doesn't work. My guess, then, if the drive works ok, is that there is something else going on that is related.

[voidx]

Grrr, lost my post, should know better.

Anyway, poking my nose in from the other thread.

You took it to the PC repair shop, where the SATA worked fine. However, the hardware configs are likely not the same. I'm mainly thinking of motherboard, and the onboard disk controllers.

You're issue might very well be issues with the OS and its associated drives not only with the SATA drive, but with your motherboard and its disk controllers. Here are some questions:

Before the SATA crashed, what was the config of the PC? Did it have the SATA and the IDE in it previously?

Did both drives have an install of Windows? And if so, was it set for dual-bootup?

When it was installed previously, what SATA driver did you use?

Is the computer slow through POST? As in, does it detect RAM, disk controllers and attached devices (HDD's, CD-ROMS) without error or delay? If it's not slow, without errors, then BIOS is very likely fine and detecting the physical devices fine. Its then likely an OS issue.

Is it slow through the load of the OS? And do you, at any point, get a dual-boot option, or multiple options of which install of windows to boot off of?

The reason its slow with both is because it would seem as though you have two disks, running on seperate controllers, but both set to master on their respective controller (IDE and SATA). The OS boots up and is presented with a confusing image of which boot partition to grab. Windows does not, in the boot.ini differentiate between IDE/SCSI/SATA. It relies on drivers, BIOS, and the physical connection order of the drives to sort out the actual physical devices, and provide it a list of logically bootable disks and partitions. boot.ini for example doesn't see or call for SATA disk 0 or IDE disk 0, it merely see's Disk(0)Partition(1) for example. The fact that pulling the jumpers off the sole IDE drive set it to being displayed as Slave in BIOS speaks to perhaps some confusion in the BIOS as to what order the IDE devices are connected in.

Did you try installing windows onto the disk at the PC repair shop? Or did it simply bootup fine into the previous install of windows. For that matter, what is the statuf of the install on the SATA disk? Did you clear the partitions when you went to re-install windows, or just install over top of the existing install? Or do you get that far?

Having the right SATA driver, for the specific version of windows you are attempting to install might be what's holding you up.

Long and meandering post, but maybe there's something in there that might help.

[monoman]

Before the SATA crashed, what was the config of the PC? Did it have the SATA and the IDE in it previously?

Did both drives have an install of Windows? And if so, was it set for dual-bootup?
The computer came with just the SATA drive and windows installed. I added the IDE drive and, from memory, image copied the SATA drive over to it, using acronis. I then set it up for duel boot with the boot.cfg file

When it was installed previously, what SATA driver did you use?

I didn't install the SATA drive but my computer came with a driver floppy. This includes silicon, intel and via SATA drivers. My motherboard is an Abit IS7, which implys it needs the intel drivers. I've tried the Abit website but this seems to, imply again, that it doesn't need the drivers. I have, however, tried installing the drivers (on F6 during windows setup), but it just hangs.


Is the computer slow through POST? As in, does it detect RAM, disk controllers and attached devices (HDD's, CD-ROMS) without error or delay? If it's not slow, without errors, then BIOS is very likely fine and detecting the physical devices fine. Its then likely an OS issue.

It's fine here, the BIOS, which i've updated to the latest, detects the SATA drive fine [/quote]

Is it slow through the load of the OS? And do you, at any point, get a dual-boot option, or multiple options of which install of windows to boot off of?


If i configure the bios to boot from the SATA drive, it's slow and eventually gives me the BSOD.
If i configure the bios to boot from the IDE drive, it takes about 10 minutes to get into windows. Once there, i can't use explorer. I have to use the "windows task manager" to run all programs.
There's no duel boot options because i reinstalled windows onto the IDE drive which reset the boot.ini file. Before i reinstalled windows, there were boot options which would result in the same situation as described above depending on which option i took.


The reason its slow with both is because it would seem as though you have two disks, running on seperate controllers, but both set to master on their respective controller (IDE and SATA). The OS boots up and is presented with a confusing image of which boot partition to grab. Windows does not, in the boot.ini differentiate between IDE/SCSI/SATA. It relies on drivers, BIOS, and the physical connection order of the drives to sort out the actual physical devices, and provide it a list of logically bootable disks and partitions. boot.ini for example doesn't see or call for SATA disk 0 or IDE disk 0, it merely see's Disk(0)Partition(1) for example. The fact that pulling the jumpers off the sole IDE drive set it to being displayed as Slave in BIOS speaks to perhaps some confusion in the BIOS as to what order the IDE devices are connected in.

Did you try installing windows onto the disk at the PC repair shop? Or did it simply bootup fine into the previous install of windows. For that matter, what is the statuf of the install on the SATA disk? Did you clear the partitions when you went to re-install windows, or just install over top of the existing install? Or do you get that far?


I'm not sure if they tried to boot the disk in the repair shop, i assume they just accessed it.

When i tried to reinstall windows on the SATA, i couldn't even get to the part where i clear the partition. It just hangs after windows has installed all drivers + 3rd party SATA driver

I'll try taking it into the repair shop and get them to fresh install windows (after impressing upon them not to touch the data partition!!!! - i'm in Bulgaria so i hope my language skills are up to it)

Thanks for your ideas. I'll let you know if i'm successful.

[voidx]

I didn't install the SATA drive but my computer came with a driver floppy. This includes silicon, intel and via SATA drivers. My motherboard is an Abit IS7, which implys it needs the intel drivers. I've tried the Abit website but this seems to, imply again, that it doesn't need the drivers. I have, however, tried installing the drivers (on F6 during windows setup), but it just hangs.



If i configure the bios to boot from the SATA drive, it's slow and eventually gives me the BSOD.

What message do you get on the BSOD? INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE perhaps? Is there a specific STOP: error related to it. It very much seems to me that the install of Windows has corrupt or lost the proper driver for the SATA drive. I also get the impression the one you have on the disk is not the correct version, or at the very least, isn't what was actually installed on the PC previously. I'd do some searching for a WinXP specific SATA driver for your motherboard, if one exists. The fact that installing the driver hangs during windows installation seems to speak to a corrupt or wrong driver.

[monoman]

What message do you get on the BSOD? INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE perhaps? Is there a specific STOP: error related to it. It very much seems to me that the install of Windows has corrupt or lost the proper driver for the SATA drive. I also get the impression the one you have on the disk is not the correct version, or at the very least, isn't what was actually installed on the PC previously. I'd do some searching for a WinXP specific SATA driver for your motherboard, if one exists. The fact that installing the driver hangs during windows installation seems to speak to a corrupt or wrong driver.

I can't remember the message it gave me - I can't check now because the drive is at the repair shop having windows reinstalled on it. Hopefully it'll work when i get it back.

I've tried searching for drivers for my Abit is7 motherboard but there aren't any on the website. There only seems to be silicon drivers for some other variations of the is7 which have an additional 2 SATA interfaces.
Hopefully this'll all be academic by tomorrow when i pick up my drive and it boots perfectly!!!! (eta :rolleyes:)